Regenerative medicine timeline
Medicine helps people who are sick or dying.
2010 Current Medical Technology.
All predictions assume sufficient research funding.
2011 (In 1 year):
- Develop multiple applications for skin, cartilage, bone, blood vessel, and some urological products (33)
- Develop insurance reimbursable regenerative therapies.
- Establish standards for FDA regenerative medicine therapy product approvals.
- Solve cell sourcing issues, giving researchers access to the materials they need to design new therapies
- Establish cost-effective means of production, paving the way for future products.
- Establish specialized cell banks for tissue storage, allowing storage of viable “off the shelf” products
2016 (in 6 years) - effective regenerative medicine therapies will be available for patient care and industrial research and development purposes:
- Further understand stem cell and progenitor cell biology
- Engineer smart degradable1 biocompatible scaffolding
- Develop microfabrication and nanofabrication technologies to produce tissues with their own complete vascular circulation(34)
- Develop complex organ patches, that could repair damaged pieces of the heart or other organs(35)
2026 (in 16 years) - the full benefits of regenerative medicine therapies will be reached:
- Harness regenerative medicine materials to produce in situ regeneration of diseased and damaged structures in many areas of the body
- Regenerate most damaged tissues and organs either in vivo or through implanted regeneration therapies
- Produce in vitro sophisticated 3-D tissues and organs that cannot be regenerated through in vivo techniques, such as an entire heart or lung
Surgery
- Microhand is a microscopic (several millimeters) manipulator that can be used for surgical operations.
- The core concept of surgery remains essentially the same after the last 100 years. The development of laparoscopy now starts a paradigm shift. Why? Because for the first time the surgeon’s hands and eyes are not directly linked to the patient - there is a technological interface between doctor and patient- the surgeon operates with remote instruments and views the entire procedure on a video monitor. This sets the stage for radical transformations in the next decade. (from Futuresurgery)
- See Robotics for robotic surgery
Links
- Look out, Band-Aids — you’re about to become obsolete. Researchers at MIT and Hong Kong University have come up with a liquid that can seal wounds in seconds. Composed of peptides (fragments of proteins), the liquid forms a gel when applied to an open wound, quickly stemming the flow of any blood. And there’s no need to worry about removing the gel, since it breaks down into amino acids as the wound heals, aiding tissue repair . . . So far the new liquid doctor has had only a few lab rats as patients, but when it makes its way to humans, it could revolutionize surgeries by making it much easier to control bleeding.
References